Yogesh Ashok Powar

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  • Online Teaching for Indian Schools

    Are Schools ready for online teaching? Why are they even looking beyond Diksha (digital infrastructure for school education)?

    Tags: Education

    Online Teaching for Indian Schools

    Many (old) schools are troubling to adjust with this forced digitization of education due to covid pandemic. Answers to everything can not be a WhatsApp group or zoom calls.

    This is a Howto on enabling minimal online education for schools.

    Have LMS if possible

    For example, Moodle is feature rich learning management solution; its #FLOSS and can even be self hosted https://docs.moodle.org/39/en/Features

    But, using it and/or creating content on it has a learning curve especially for the teachers &/ management who are used to highly engineered  and addictive-by-design platforms like Facebook,  Whatapp or other social media apps.

    Besides there is also a cost of implementing  &/or maintaining these LMS platforms which management is trying to avoid given the uncertainty of the pandemic timeline.

    Have a minimal website or web-page or a blog page

    Announcements can be made here and its link can be shared in SMS/Chat. Website provides ways to correct the contents once posted.

    One can explore good old blogging platforms like Github, WordPress or Blogger; which are free and don’t require viewers to have a login.

    Avoid remote classes using real time Internet tools

    Forget the Internet, most students will not have access to computers or even a mobile on specified time.

    So dont design courses with live video/audio communication. Having it will benefit only a limited few.

    Focus on remote assessment or progress

    Let teachers decide a topic/subtopic with reference from the books and provide questions or quizzes around that topic to assess the students progress. Chase parents for tracking their child’s progress.

    Creating a good video content is difficult and costly.

    It’s better to share links of existing good public domain contents than making teachers create one.

    Ideally, it should be the responsibility of the education board/universities to provide the digital contents just like the books.

    Diksha has too good contents and its an initiative of the National Council of Educational Research and Training Ministry of Education, Govt of India. They have done a really good work.

    Don’t share course content & videos on WhatsApp

    Use WA for just chatting and sharing links. Create content on  Upload videos on YouTube. Make comments/like disabled.

    Focus on inclusion

    Students with access to resources like the Internet, computers or parents who-teach-their-kids would definitely have an edge over others without it. In this pandandemic situation, let teachers help the ones without right access.

    If scaling is the problem, let the school run some mentorship program. Senior-students/parents/volunteers can reach the specific students in need.


    Tags: Education
    Updated on: 2020-06-27